16:00:01 <meskio> #startmeeting tor anti-censorship meeting
16:00:01 <MeetBot> Meeting started Thu Jun  5 16:00:01 2025 UTC.  The chair is meskio. Information about MeetBot at http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot.
16:00:01 <MeetBot> Useful Commands: #action #agreed #help #info #idea #link #topic.
16:00:05 <meskio> hello everyone!!!
16:00:09 <meskio> here is our meeting pad: https://pad.riseup.net/p/r.9574e996bb9c0266213d38b91b56c469
16:00:11 <meskio> ask me in private to give you the link of the pad to be able to edit it if you don't have it
16:00:13 <meskio> I'll wait few minutes for everybody to add you've been working on and put items on the agenda
16:00:16 <cohosh> hi
16:03:40 <meskio> we have one discussion topic:
16:03:43 <meskio> Adding more snowflake builtin bridge options
16:03:47 <meskio> cohosh: ?
16:04:11 <cohosh> i opened tor-browser#43842 to discuss this
16:04:33 <cohosh> orbot has different snowflake builtin bridge options for each of the three rendezvous methods
16:04:59 <cohosh> i think this is, in general, a good idea
16:05:20 <cohosh> we have the circumvention settings api but if the front domain is unusable or blocked, users have trouble reaching it
16:05:46 <cohosh> we're seeing that our default settings are less and less generalizable lately as different places try to block snowflake in different ways
16:06:19 <cohosh> however, for sqs i think it's better to wait and continue to ramp up slowly before making it a builtin option for cost reasons
16:06:51 <meskio> sounds good, I wonder how to explain the differencies to users, but something like "use this by default and it fails use the others" might work for most users
16:07:02 <cohosh> my costs jumped up to 8 USD last month, which is still low, but considering the fraction of SQS users compared to other rendezvous methods, i'm still not sure it will scale well
16:07:40 <cohosh> meskio: yeah i was thinking having something like "snowflake-google" (ampcache), "snowflake-cdn77", and "snowflake-amazon" (SQS, when it's ready)
16:07:54 <cohosh> we did soemthing similar with meek in the past
16:08:13 <meskio> +1
16:08:18 <cohosh> the nice thing about this is it also acts as a disclosure of which third party is seeing your IP address and the fact you're connecting to Tor
16:08:44 <cohosh> dcf1: thanks for the link to https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/Snowflake-costs
16:08:55 <cohosh> i spent a few minutes trying to find that page yesterday
16:09:44 <cohosh> that's it from me, i think the actionable thing is to add a snowflake-ampcache bridge as a builtin then
16:09:53 <dcf1> I had this dream once of a per-transport configuration menu in Tor Browser connection settings, where you pick a transport and it shows a custom control panel for that transport (i.e. for snowflake a dropdown with rendezvous methods). Rather than encode every combinatorial option into a pseudo–transport name in a single dropdown.
16:10:11 <cohosh> hm, interesting
16:11:17 <meskio> that might make sense, we should ask the UX team about it
16:13:27 <cohosh> yeah, definitely
16:13:44 <meskio> cohosh: should we look into moving SQS costs to TPI?
16:14:08 <cohosh> meskio: that would be preferred but even so we need to be careful about scaling
16:14:25 <cohosh> i'll send an email to start that conversation
16:14:25 <meskio> sure, I'll ask around on how to do that
16:14:35 <cohosh> the nice thing is, AWS budget actions seem to work well
16:14:53 <cohosh> meskio: oh that would be great, thanks
16:16:10 <meskio> I guess we'll wait for apps team to voice their opinion on the issue
16:16:17 <meskio> anything more on this topic?
16:16:23 <cohosh> not from me
16:16:54 <meskio> no more discussion topics, but few interesting links
16:17:02 <meskio> A wall behind a wall
16:17:07 <meskio> a gfw.report publication
16:18:20 <cohosh> nice! maybe we could do a reading group discussion on this
16:18:40 <meskio> sure, that will be nice
16:19:19 <meskio> should we try in two weeks (June 19)?
16:19:46 <cohosh> that can work for me
16:20:09 <meskio> I'll check with onyinyang and shelikhoo_ once they are online, but let's try that date
16:20:57 <meskio> https://github.com/ban6cat6/aparecium
16:21:38 * onyinyang agrees from absentia
16:21:45 <meskio> XD
16:21:46 <cohosh> :)
16:22:06 <meskio> on a fast look it doesn't look like this would apply to something like webtunnel were we use a real nginx/apache server
16:22:28 <meskio> but maybe I'm not sure I understand all the details
16:22:46 <meskio> anyway, yes nice graphs of ShadowTLS and REALITY
16:24:17 <meskio> and the last link is about snowflake users in Turkmenistan, they remain elevated
16:24:38 <meskio> BTW, since today we do recommend snowflake in turkmenistan as default option in circumvention settings
16:24:59 <cohosh> i'm glad it's continuing to work there
16:25:12 <dcf1> meskio: oh, is there a commit reference for that? I'll add it to the metrics timeline.
16:26:07 * meskio looks for the commit
16:26:25 <meskio> https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys-admin/-/commit/ccd914ba9c3828c77e7ffaa7458db79cb0ef93eb
16:28:03 <meskio> we should somehow map the changes in the circumvention map to the metrics timeline, maybe I should get used to do changes in the timeline when we change the map
16:29:13 <meskio> anything more for today?
16:29:32 <cohosh> not from me
16:30:00 <dcf1> meskio: my usual thinking is, document it if it might help explain a graph feature, like if someone is looking at the graph and might want to know possible causes or related events
16:30:44 <meskio> I agree, but I haven't being giving much love to the metrics timeline
16:30:55 <meskio> dcf1: there are few other changes that we might want to document together
16:31:16 <meskio> https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys-admin/-/merge_requests/39#note_3206264
16:31:38 <dcf1> you should be able to commit, and feel free to commit directly, no need for a MR or discussion. The "tidy" script checks the syntax of the file.
16:31:47 <meskio> and then maybe the right commit is https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys-admin/-/commit/85fc4032d15fc6776f6cb31d5f9fdb1ff983b2a8
16:31:53 <meskio> as mine was just fixing a typo of this one
16:32:08 <dcf1> got it
16:32:27 <meskio> thanks, I'll do
16:33:19 <meskio> I guess we can finish this meeting here
16:33:31 <meskio> #endmeeting